Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Unified Font Object
The Unified Font Object (UFO) is an XML-based source file format for digital fonts. It was created by Tal Leming, Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland. Contributors to the format also include Ben Kiel and Frederik Berlaen. According to its creators, the UFO is a "future proof" open format that is designed to be "application independent", "human readable and human editable".
The first version of the UFO format was created in 2003. The most recent version, UFO 3, was released in 2012.
The idea for the Unified Font Object originated with a customized version of the font editor Fontographer 3.5. Petr van Blokland, together with Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland, and with assistance from David Berlow and Steven Paul of the Font Bureau, created and distributed on a subscription basis a customized version of Fontographer called RoboFog in 1996. RoboFog allowed users to script in Python, a language Just's brother Guido van Rossum invented two years prior in 1994. The tool became very popular among type designers because of the ability to automate tasks.
In 1998, FontLab, rival font editor developer to Fontographer (then owned by Macromedia) added Python to version 2.0 of their application, partially due to the popularity of RoboFog. On March 24, 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0, a major rewrite of the Mac operating system. Fontographer was by then too old to be ported to Mac OS X, so the RoboFog developers turned their attention to FontLab.
In February, 2003, at the TypoTechnica conference in Heidelberg, van Rossum, van Blokland and Baltimore-based type designer Tal Leming combined their existing FontLab API scripts into a Python module called RoboFab. The group started going by the name "The RoboFab Consortium". With RoboFab came a need for an interchange file format for transferring font data between RoboFog and FontLab. In April, 2003, van Rossum started work on an XML-based file format for glyph data called the Glyph Interchange Format (GLIF). In July, 2003, the group started work on the first UFO file format (later known as "UFO 1"), which used "GLIF for glyph information and Apple's .plist (also XML based and entirely cross platform) for any other data as listings, indices, etc." The group intended to present it at the 2003 RoboThon conference, but its launch was delayed until March 14, 2004.
The group introduced the UFO with the following manifesto:
In the consortium's view, font data should be independent of font editors to avoid issues like Software rot, which the field of type design is particularly prone to, due to the long period of time that fonts take to develop and the relative lack of variety in font editing applications.
In 2009, UFO version 2 was announced at RoboThon 2009, bringing minor changes to the format. A variety of applications outside of FontLab using the UFO format started to be written at around this time, such as Leming's kerning application MetricsMachine, van Blokland's interpolation application, Superpolator, and Frederik Berlaen's parametric design application, KalliCulator.
Hub AI
Unified Font Object AI simulator
(@Unified Font Object_simulator)
Unified Font Object
The Unified Font Object (UFO) is an XML-based source file format for digital fonts. It was created by Tal Leming, Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland. Contributors to the format also include Ben Kiel and Frederik Berlaen. According to its creators, the UFO is a "future proof" open format that is designed to be "application independent", "human readable and human editable".
The first version of the UFO format was created in 2003. The most recent version, UFO 3, was released in 2012.
The idea for the Unified Font Object originated with a customized version of the font editor Fontographer 3.5. Petr van Blokland, together with Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland, and with assistance from David Berlow and Steven Paul of the Font Bureau, created and distributed on a subscription basis a customized version of Fontographer called RoboFog in 1996. RoboFog allowed users to script in Python, a language Just's brother Guido van Rossum invented two years prior in 1994. The tool became very popular among type designers because of the ability to automate tasks.
In 1998, FontLab, rival font editor developer to Fontographer (then owned by Macromedia) added Python to version 2.0 of their application, partially due to the popularity of RoboFog. On March 24, 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0, a major rewrite of the Mac operating system. Fontographer was by then too old to be ported to Mac OS X, so the RoboFog developers turned their attention to FontLab.
In February, 2003, at the TypoTechnica conference in Heidelberg, van Rossum, van Blokland and Baltimore-based type designer Tal Leming combined their existing FontLab API scripts into a Python module called RoboFab. The group started going by the name "The RoboFab Consortium". With RoboFab came a need for an interchange file format for transferring font data between RoboFog and FontLab. In April, 2003, van Rossum started work on an XML-based file format for glyph data called the Glyph Interchange Format (GLIF). In July, 2003, the group started work on the first UFO file format (later known as "UFO 1"), which used "GLIF for glyph information and Apple's .plist (also XML based and entirely cross platform) for any other data as listings, indices, etc." The group intended to present it at the 2003 RoboThon conference, but its launch was delayed until March 14, 2004.
The group introduced the UFO with the following manifesto:
In the consortium's view, font data should be independent of font editors to avoid issues like Software rot, which the field of type design is particularly prone to, due to the long period of time that fonts take to develop and the relative lack of variety in font editing applications.
In 2009, UFO version 2 was announced at RoboThon 2009, bringing minor changes to the format. A variety of applications outside of FontLab using the UFO format started to be written at around this time, such as Leming's kerning application MetricsMachine, van Blokland's interpolation application, Superpolator, and Frederik Berlaen's parametric design application, KalliCulator.